fictitious QA&P West TX layout agriculture industry

The weather has been horrible for doing things outside so there's been a little headway on the staging yard. A couple of photos attached.

 

How did you come to acquire so many padlocks?

GS

 

About 25 years ago I was in sales for a company that sold high security locks. My territory was TX / MS / AR / OK / NM. The attached photo shows some of their other locks. The one on the left is of a $200 padlock (current pricing). My customers were the military, vending companies, airlines (drink carts on airliners), railroads, Atomic Energy Commission, etc. You can't go to the hardware store and buy these locks. They could be keyed in many different master keying configurations. The larger ones are virtually unpickable, unbreakable, etc., etc. You can't get the keys at the hardware store. I did a test with the provost marshall at Ft Hood in 1999 on one of our locks. He had this 6' 5" well- muscled soldier with a large set of bolt cutters try to cut the shackle on one of our medium sized locks. It ruined the boltcutter. Back in the early '90's we did a test with the US Navy and used some locks on things that hung in saltwater. After a year they still worked.

The particular locks in the photo in the previous post were small locks for drink carts on airliners. When companies turned them in for new ones, I ended up with a sizeable box of old ones. The key code is changed for the new run of locks, so the old ones aren't any good to anyone and nobody has the key to the old ones except me and the company (that code is never re-issued--there are something like 2.5 million potential codes. They don't have tumblers on the inside--they have rotating disks). My box probably has 150 or more locks. They're great for track laying, modeling weights, etc.

Anyway, that's the long answer.

 

Those would work well. Anything heavy, flat on the bottom and skinny...

 

Amazing...the staging yard works like a champ. Nothing I've ever built has worked right the first time! The original plan was for five tracks, but there's room for six, so I may buy one more switch and a little more flex track and add the second additional track. You never know...it may be needed. Still need to cut rail gaps and add some feeder wires, but that will be easy.

Last week Tom Holley let me know that there was a listing on ebay for some used Aristocraft walk around throttles. I won them. Once that system is installed, the enjoyment level of running trains will be increased exponentially. But it will also allow me to go into the staging yard closet to move trains. As a result, I may not wire the switches. They've got ground throws, and since I'll be standing there to ensure the correct track was chosen, it would be just as easy to use the ground throw and save a bunch of wiring. The rest of the layout has hidden switch machines, but the goal on the staging yard was CHEAP, so I bought Atlas snap track 22" radius switches for the staging yard.

The slightly weathered F3A on the point came from Tom Holley.